Before I left for my trip, I gathered all of my friends' addresses and was prepared to send out a huge stack of postcards from Down Under. After a couple of weeks had passed and I had gathered enough stories to send back home, I bought about 20 postcards, sat in my room in my hostel and wrote them all out. 20-something dollars worth of postage later, they had all been mailed. I did not get that satisfied feeling I thought I would get. Instead, my hand was sore and my wallet had shrunk. I decided that this was the first and the last time that I would be sending postcards home.
What would I have done without Facebook while I was away? Social media, specifically Facebook - this was 2009 when Facebook was still a novelty - really changed the way I kept in touch with family, old friends and new friends that I was meeting along the way.
While traveling, you realize how important it is to have access to computers. When you're living at home, you don't even think twice about sending an email, checking messages or tweeting and Facebook-ing from your computer or your phone. But you realize that quick communication can be seen as a luxury when you're traveling through the Outback of Australia, or at a shady internet cafe in Bangkok. Of course, many hostels have computers, but internet cards can get expensive and sometimes the computers are occupied when you need one. I met some people who brought their computers with them. I did not - and those people quickly became very important to me ;)
Cape Tribulation - North Queensland Australia -
an area so remote that there was no cell phone reception in the whole town!
But even worse than expensive internet, phone calls were more of a challenge. Be prepared that when you say you'll call home, that sometimes that is not always possible. I spent lots of time looking for pay phones in Sydney, in the scorching heat to call my parents that I was supposed to have called the day before....poor parents were probably waiting by the phone, but got no ring from me :( sorry parents.... So an easy way to keep in touch is via Facebook. You can always leave a message on someone's wall letting them know that you haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I countries where English is not the first language, I didn't even bother looking for a phone. I stuck to the internet for my connection to home.
Advice for travellers....get yourself a cheap phone for about 20$ so that you can call your new friends LOCALLY. If you're going to call home, get a long distance card. And when you're making plans to go fly somewhere remote, don't give times when you'll call family or friends. They will get worried if they don't hear from you. But use the internet! It's the easiest way!
Even with the challenges that I sometimes faced with internet access, Facebook was a great tool for me and I spent more time keeping in touch that way than I did with a phone. I could see what was going on back home and got excited when I could chat with someone. Social media has definitely changed the way we communicate and for me, it changed the way I travelled. My parents laughed when I told them that people now backpack with computers in their suitcases....a definite change from the days when they were hippies trekking through Europe.
And now that I think of it, I don't even know if all of those post cards even made it home. Snail mail is so 1999.
My home for 5 months....Sydney Beach House. I recommend to anyone traveling to Sydney :)
... Claire was here.
